Speaking of names, Mycroft, should we not have names for thy convict brethren? They were omitted in thy first book at Kosala’s insistence, to protect the Servicers, but this new chronicle is uncensored, made, not for thy contemporaries, but for me alone. I am not about to track down thy coconspirators by name and rat them out to Papadelias. Why not use names?

“Well said, friend Reader!” Hobbes seconds heartily. “There is no harm in telling us, rather great good. Achilles’s former captains, Menestius, Eudorus, Pisandrus, Phoenix, Alcimedon, they will never leave men’s memory since Homer graced them with eternal fame. Do these brave Servicers deserve less?”

Deserve less? If anything, those sitting with us here, who follow battle-hard Achilles not by birth but by choice, deserve fame’s elegy even more than the ancient Myrmidon captains. Yet still I hesitate to use real names. It is not you, my distant masters, whom I fear. It is hope. What if one of my friends survives to the war’s last day? And what if, in the war’s wake, the thrill-puffed victors think to beat the beaten further with purges and show-trials? Should our side be the losers in this war, and should this chronicle surface as the victors gloat, then I might have the survivors’ executions on my much-wounded conscience if I include their names. Better to guard them safe with anonymity, and let them write their own accounts at the war’s end, if they survive.

Such caution is not unreasonable. But if thou wilt not use true names, Mycroft, at least use false ones, some contrivance to end this intolerable vagueness: “young one,” “another,” I shall never keep it straight.

As you command, reader.

“Sir, if the sides are taking shape now,” Eudorus braved, the most athletic of our little company, “and if you’re sure that Sniper is our enemy, does that mean we finally have a goal? A side of our own?”

Achilles’s brows narrowed, like a javelin thrower’s fixing on his target. “Why do you want to die for me?”

Eudorus grinned. “I’m hoping for at least fifty-fifty odds of survival, but—”

“No.” The Great Soldier had no time for flippancy. “If you fight for me you’ll die. Why do you want that?”

Eudorus paused as gravity set in. “Mycroft expl—”

“Mycroft could talk a fox into skinning itself.” The famous runner spared me a fast glance. “Ignoring Mycroft, why do you want to fight, and kill, and die for me?”

“I…” If Eudorus had had an answer, the words died unwinged in his throat as he endured great Achilles’s glare.

“You Servicers are protected,” Achilles reminded us, rising to his feet. “You’re neutral, more Hive-less even than the Hiveless. You know how to forage and feed yourselves, and no side expects you to participate in this at all. Keep your heads down and you’ll survive if anyone does. Why choose death?” The hero fixed his glare on face after face, the question keen in his eyes as he tested all: Why die for this? For me?